It took me a while, but here, finally, comes the official blenderartists announcement. Graswald is officially released, you can find it on the blendermarket and gumroad.
This thread will host all the major Graswald announcements and updates, for more insight into the creation process and to report bugs, please visit this thread: Graswald - News and Work in Progress!
So what exactly is Graswald?
Graswald is a professional high-quality asset pack containing different species of weeds, grass, and moss as well as various kinds of debris, packed in a powerful add-on that allows incredible customization.
Plants grow in many different ways, depending on the amount of rain they get, the amount of sunlight, the temperature, their age, and other species that grow in the same place (plants AND animals). That way, you might find the same species of grass growing as a big tuft or mowed down in your lawn, looking completely different. Most asset packs though focus on species only, and therefore can't illustrate the full variety of vegetation.
To solve this, Graswald assets are organized by species, but for each species, you can use different particle systems, displaying different variants of the same species.
For example, if you want to add Ribwort Plantains to your scene, you can either add big plantains like you'd find in a meadow or the smaller variant that might grow in your lawn. You can also support them with the fitting plantain flowers, or some dead plantains, that are decaying below.
Every single asset was carefully modeled with reference to the structural details of the real plant. With Graswald, you'll get photoreal grass with visible nodes, sheaths, and collars or weed flowers with visible ligules and stigmata, allowing stunning detail that even holds up in close-up situations and micro shots.
Add ready-made Particle Systems to your scene with literally three clicks, or import the individual assets, which you can then place by hand for close-up situations.
Graswald doesn't only provide green grass blades and a few weeds. Adding dead leaves, (dead) moss, sticks, pine needles and other scatter debris lets you build environments from the ground up that look photoreal and are highly customizable.
Graswald consists of a total of 32 different species of grass, weeds, moss, dead leaves and ground debris.
Chose between a total of 79 different particle systems consisting of up to 69 model variations per particle system.
You'll get a total of 663 different models, allowing an incredible amount of variation for your nature scenes.
If you want to jump on the endless Physically Based Rendering train, you're good to go! All Graswald materials are using the brand new Principled BSDF shader, allowing a flexible workflow with physically correct shading where you need it. This ensures that the assets will always look great in every lighting condition!
Artistic control is still important though, so if you want to have less intense reflections for whatever reasons, do not despair. Graswald's interface allows you to change all important settings, so you'll get full control of your Roughness, Specular, Bump and Translucency.
With the assets comes a powerful system allowing you to customize and optimize your plants to any needs.
Besides the standard technical settings (Specular, Roughness, Translucency, Bump, Hue, Saturation, and Value) you can get even closer to real nature by altering the looks with more artistic settings.
Add dead patches to your grass and change their brightness and color, as well as their scale, spread, and intensity.
There's always some dead, dry grass, even in the finest lawns. Add dead grass blades with the dryness settings and use Graswald's sophisticated masking tools to achieve the exact look you aim for.
Speaking of lawns, add lawn stripes to your cut grass to add incredible patterns for a Big League Look.
Randomize all your assets with value and color randomization settings.
But here comes the big deal:
There's one thing that seems to always be missing in CG environments: Death.
A lot of nature renders seem off because they look unnaturally healthy and green. In the real world, though, this is not the case. Plants live in a constant struggle for space, water, and sunlight. Most of them die or have at least some dead parts, which you don't notice when you see it, but you DO notice if they're missing!
Graswald allows you to change the age of your plants, making it possible to have young fresh leaves for a lovely spring atmosphere or old, broken, yellow leaves to nail those winter scenes, adding that extra tiny bit of realism, to get your renders to the next level!
Use a sophisticated collection of masking sliders, to get exactly the results you want by altering the overall percentage, the intensity and the percentage of single leaves of an individual plant.
Graswald assets come in three different material qualities: High, Medium and Low.
The High material quality is perfect for close-ups, featuring transparency and the highest texture resolution (up to 4k).
The Medium material quality works well for larger scenes, where the plants aren't the focus or where faster rendering is needed. No transparency and 512px large textures make this material optimal for people with no time or loads of expensive computers.
The Low material quality makes scattering huge areas much easier. With no transparency and a minimal texture size of 16px, you don't have to worry about investing in detail that won't be visible in the final result, thus resulting in very fast render times.
But thanks to the powerful Graswald interface, you can not only optimize the material, you can change the number of polygons yourself as well!
You can either add levels of subdivision for each particle system visible in the viewport and/or only render, or decimate them, just by tweaking the sliders in the Graswald menu!
Furthermore, all assets have been modeled with optimization in mind, meaning that each model only has the number of polygons that are needed to achieve photorealistic shapes and shading.
The same thoughts were considered with the transparency. Huge amounts of transparency are not only causing greater render times but can also cause weird artifacts. Graswald assets, however, are restricted to the lowest amount of transparency possible, leading to faster render times and less memory consumption.
Still not convinced? Then listen to these fine guys:
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"Graswald is a package with high-quality plants created with close attention to detail, plus an easy to use user interface for quick customization. I especially love the feature that you can change the age of the grass with a slider, so you can turn a green meadow into a dry grass field. I will have a lot of fun with this tool in future projects, totally recommended!"
Zacharias Reinhardt 3D Artist & Certified Blender Trainer |
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"The amount of work, attention to detail and quality is a breath of fresh are straight from nature. The addon is clean and easy to use to get great looking, top-notch nature to fill out your scene. It's now going to be a part of my regular pipe-line" Mason Menzies Asset Developer at Poliigon.com/Environment Artist |
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"Graswald does all the hard work for you, with insanely detailed models that don't blow the polygon budget, packed inside a clever plugin to automate all the boring parts. Certainly a great addition to every artist's toolbox."
Guilherme Henrique SD Art Director at Textures.com |
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"I was so amazed by the ridiculous amount of detail that went into these models! When there's something I have learned about nature assets, then that there can be never enough of them to match the beautiful variety of nature. Graswald does exactly that, offering the artist maximum flexibility with sophisticated distribution and shaders."
Lukas Walzer 3D Artist at UP design studio Stuttgart |
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"Graswald is an amazing tool. It is highly customizable, offers an incredible level of details, stunning realism, and big variety. It allows you to create convincing environments without much effort."
Helmy Ardiansyah Freelance 3D Artist |
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"Graswald is quite possibly the best grass and shrubs pack for blender that I've ever seen. It's got a great selection of different plants, all of which look incredibly realistic and are very useful in almost any nature scene. The addon that comes with Graswald is also well designed and pleasant to work with."
Rico Cilliers Freelance 3D Sculptor/Modeler/Texturer |
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"Graswald is a mind-blowing add-on. With Graswald, just a few clicks can land you an industry-grade nature render -- I don't think there is anything else out there that can do that."
Grant Wilk Host of Remington Graphics & CGC Weekly |
To all customers: please redownload Graswald 1.0, the dandelion problem has been fixed!
Glad to see this finally get a release. It’s been fun following the development, and when I have the spare cash I’ll definitely invest.
Edit: most problems fixed in 1.14 (Automn Awkbit and mosses still have issues).
Would it be possible for you to post a screenshot of what you mean and maybe also information about your lighting? As you can see in this video, a simple HDRI image with the strength of 1 is enough to light it, that simple (which btw. is exactly what I did to render these dandelions in the image you were referring to, these are simply 4 different HDRI’s with the strength set to 1.)
Often the lighting will make or break a scene and, of course, if your lighting is too strong or unrealistic, the best assets will look stupid. But the pbr setup guarantees that the assets look consistent, whether the lighting is daylight, night or afternoon.
Edit: most problems fixed in 1.14 (Automn Awkbit and mosses still have issues).
This is definitely not normal. Could you be so kind as to share the blend file, so I can take a look at it? If you prefer you can also do it via PM.
Edit: most problems fixed in 1.14 (Automn Awkbit and mosses still have issues).
I see what you mean. We decided though, to have them separate, as this allows much more customization. For example, you can set the number of flowers independently from the number of plants. This is especially helpful when it comes to autumn/winter scenes, where there might not be that many flowers (or even none). It also allows adjusting the height of the stems which otherwise would not have been possible.
If you want to have flowers and leaves at the same point, just copy the plant system and add the flowers, be sure the seed is the same.
Edit: most problems fixed in 1.14 (Automn Awkbit and mosses still have issues).
amazing paid tool !!! :))
Edit: most problems fixed in 1.14 (Automn Awkbit and mosses still have issues).
Everything else renders fine? I’d suggest you go into the material editor and rebuild a simple material (principled bsdf with all the textures and then add some translucency with the color of the color map to it) to see if it still behaves that way…
lower HDRI strength
Edit: most problems fixed in 1.14 (Automn Awkbit and mosses still have issues).
I can understand your frustration, but as I have told you before via PM, if I render the exact same scene on my computer, I get this result: 
I did not use “biased tricks” here and I have never told you to do so as well, the problem is, that neither I or anyone of my 15 professional blender users and tester have encountered this kind of problem yet. Do the other plants work for you? All assets use the exact same material structure, so if only the dandelion doesn’t work, I guess that somehow these have been accidentally edited in some sort of way. What strengthens this idea is the fact, that also the transparency was messed up in the file you sent me.
As you can see in this video, the dandelion flower actually works fine, and indeed looks good in this simple lighting condition (the aspect you like to quote to blame me wrong).
I can’t do magic. All I can do is ask you more questions to find out why this works for everyone except for your two computers… When my coder comes back from his trip, he might have another idea, but I cannot find out what the problem is if I and the others don’t seem to have this problem.
As this thread is mostly for official questions and announcements, I like to postpone this discussion to PM, as we’re just spamming the thread. Please be patient, I understand why you’re frustrated, but we do all we can do to solve your special problem!
it’s not a trick & you wont get unbiased results – LEARN about IBL with HDRIs!!!
not all HDRIs have equal intensities & the one you use is a strong one!!!
Graswald’s Assets will be released as FBX with Textures version this Wednesday for all the non-blender users.
So if you know anyone who is not using blender, but could be interested, spread the word. The assets will be available on the blendermarket, so that non blender people might learn more/donate to blender! If you want to help me with that, retweet this:
Graswald's Assets will be released as FBX with Textures version this Wednesday!
— Julius Harling (@julius_harling) 25. Juni 2018
This was one of the most requested features I heard during the last days, so I'm happy to say, that it will be out, soon :D Non-Blender users can then enjoy #Graswald's diverse variant based assets! pic.twitter.com/ByAvpYAcPZ
Hi @Yukon,
after you kept to tell me I was wrong and kept sending me bug-free images.
I had to ask a friend of mine, who happens to be a cycles dev. He has many other thing to do at the moment but was kind enough to have a look. Of course, he had the bug on the first try with the file I send to you, on both stable and Buildbot. You said you opened my file with official Blender and didn’t change anything to get the render you send above, which of course is impossible because:
He diagnostisized that the shader is not energy conserving. It was very visible on the dandelions, because the petals are dense and the many bounces with full GI gave every time more energy, going very fast to something pure white.
I transmitted the diagnosis to your dev. Before that, he also told me there was no problem. Of course, he became very kind and constructive all of a sudden, when he had the feedback of this cycles dev.
Not every user here knows personally the master devs. If it wasn’t my case, you would have kept the discussion in PM with faked renders to tell me wrong and it may have worked.
You use advertising techniques like selling on the Blender Market “so that non blender people might learn more/donate to blender!” although you don’t even have the dev fund contribution on your own product.
Your assets may be ok ‘in all lightning conditions’ as promoted after the upcoming updates, but your selling techniques will stay disgusting to me.
